At Sea on Coast Guard’s Burnable, Sinkable Pita : Hard-Luck Skipper in Trouble Again on Newport Bay as Service Goes Through Yearly Rescue Training Drill

It was 1:09 p.m. Friday when the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Point Divide received the SOS from the 21-foot Pita, in Newport Bay. The small craft was in trouble, with “sparks flying all over the place,” the panicky skipper radioed.

“We’ve located you,” the Point Divide radioed back. “Don your life jacket at this time.”

Two minutes later, amid clouds of thick gray smoke, flames shot from the Pita and the lone man on board appeared to be injured. The Coast Guard was on the way.

The rescue actually was a training drill for the 82-foot Point Divide, berthed at Newport Beach. And the skipper in trouble was Erik Nygren, 37, a petty officer assigned to the Coast Guard’s Pacific Area Training Team, which planned the accident.

Nygren, of Sacramento, is in Southern California with five other members of the team for annual training exercises. This afternoon, they will head for San Diego to help train Coast Guard personnel there.

The team travels about 30 weeks a year on training missions, covering the California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska coasts and the Hawaiian Islands. “Training is our primary purpose in life,” said Lt. Cmdr. Randy Corrigan, 33, the team leader. “It’s a demanding job, but it’s a fun job,” he said.

Nygren and another team member converted the Pita, once a river boat, into the unusual training vessel. The aluminum-hulled craft is equipped with a built-in fire pit and a “flood box,” which allows water to come in from beneath the boat. Hence it can burn, take on water and even sink as often as necessary.

Corrigan and Lt. Mike Parks, of the Point Divide, said the drill culminated a week of training for the ship’s crew, whose primary mission was to rescue Nygren.

“The first thing is to reduce the fire so we can get to the victim,” Parks said. Then, with the Pita rapidly taking on water, the fire must be extinguished and the boat secured to prevent it from sinking.

In such a drill, risks to personnel are slight, Parks said, fire being the biggest danger. During a similar exercise last year, however, an explosion at the training team’s headquarters, near Oakland, blew a trainer into the water with third-degree burns, Corrigan said.

“Any person in a burning boat incurs some risk,” Parks said.

Nygren has been playing the part of victim for about a year and a half. “I’m the only one crazy enough to do it,” he said, just before boarding the boat to set it ablaze.

Friday, in his accustomed role, he feigned an unidentified injury and unconsciousness. Thus, he couldn’t help in his rescue.

When the Point Divide pulled near the burning Pita, water hoses were turned on the fire and the skipper. (In an actual mishap, foam would have been used.) As the crew scurried back and forth, wind and currents pulled the boat into shallow water, compounding the rescuers’ problems.

But by 1:17 p.m., the fire was out, and the two vessels were secured to each other by grappling hooks and lines. Four minutes later, Nygren was strapped into a Stokes litter--a basket-like stretcher with ropes attached to four corners--and taken aboard the Point Divide.

But the work was not over. While the injured skipper was being secured in the litter by three crew members, others were activating a bailing pump. Still other crew members set about patching the holes in the Pita’s hull with hardwood plugs.

In a real accident, the men would also use “rags, mattresses or anything they can find to stop the leaking,” Corrigan said.

By 1:30 p.m., the Pita was fastened to the side of the Point Divide and was being towed to shore.

It was all over except the critique, which was mostly favorable: Both victim and vessel had survived.